Robert Kaplan - Imperial Grunts

“Weak noncoms, badly trained, underpaid,” he huffed. “They steal bullets to feed their families. The Thai army is better, and the Koreans and Singaporeans are just plain damn good soldiers. Even with their booze, I found Mongolian troops are superior to the Fils. The Fils are like the Panamanians I’ve worked with. They need basics, not NODs. You can fight at night without NODs if you use SLLS [Smell. Look. Listen. Silence]. The best time to assault is at night in the pouring rain; the mud hides your sounds and the water your scent. Shooting, moving, communicating, that’s the essence of soldiering. You can do it with the most rudimentary technology.”

Because the Green Berets’ expectations were so low, no one was depressed. “We can make some progress identifying talented cadres,” Maj. Lemire assured me, “American-influenced Fil officers who will work their way up the command chain.” To repeat: Despite the Hollywood stuff, the primary focus of Special Forces was not commando raids but the instruction of indigenous armies. “Drop us in, and we’ll train ’em, whoever they are. Gathering intelligence and building relationships are indirect benefits of that.” If the southern Philippines broke away to join a new, radical Muslim state along with parts of Malaysia and Indonesia, or if the Philippine state itself collapsed from within, there would always be an American-influenced cadre here to deal with events. That was the hope.

“As frustrating as things are, if we were not here, somebody else would be, like the Chinese,” Sgt. Maj. Walsh said. “What needs to happen is the proliferation of one- and two-man missions, and twelve-man A-teams embedded directly with the Filipino military; that’s how we can really get things done, and kill Muslim bad guys.”

Hovering over the Special Forces troops at Camp Malagutay was the lugubrious shadow of the JSOTF. The Green Berets provided “security assistance”—that is, they trained the trainers of the elite units of the host nation. As such they were funded under U.S. Title 22, which meant they reported to the State Department and therefore to the U.S. Embassy in Manila, whereas the JSOTF came under the Department of Defense’s Title 10, and therefore, theoretically at least, should not have been able to tell the Special Forces troops at Camp Malagutay how to run their lives. Had the JSOTF not been close by—and Maj. Lemire’s gang truly wished it wasn’t—his troops would have been able to do as they pleased: go out at night, mix more with the locals, exactly what Army Special Forces did everywhere else.

At both Tolemaida and Espinal in Colombia, after a hard day’s training, the Green Berets would hit the town almost every night. Here they had to request permission in advance from the JSOTF, and declare in detail a force protection plan in order to visit the tamest of local restaurants. I insisted on going out every night, and Maj. Lemire’s boys used that as an excuse to get out themselves.

Actually, Maj. Lemire got along just fine with Col. Walker and Lt. Col. Downey, the JSOTF commanders. It was the unwieldy bureaucratic arrangement, made worse by their predecessors, which had given him problems.

Each night about eight of us went to La Vista del Mar, a restaurant and club with a panoramic view of the Sulu Sea. We were accompanied by the girls who did the team laundry for $20 per month. These girls were typical Filipinas: small-boned, symmetrically featured, and walnut-complexioned beauties, with twangy, mellow Spanish-style voices and subservient oriental manners, a devouring mix of South America and Asia. Though one of the Green Berets slyly disappeared for an hour with a girl into the darkness of the beachfront, with its conveniently noisy winds, otherwise, the evenings were innocent, the consequence of the strict JSOTF regulations and the commonplace logistical problems of shacking up with someone. And that was a shame, at least in my opinion, given the number of single and divorced guys in the group, and the stark fact of a six-month deployment. Had this been the old Pacific Army, some of these men would have taken some of these girls as mistresses.

With sex not an option, the evenings at La Vista del Mar were given over to letting off steam, while enjoying the spicy crabs, the San Miguel beer, and the mesmerizing sea winds. “Don’t order the pizza,” one Green Beret advised me. “It’s so dry that biting into it is like taking communion.” A sergeant from Indiana treated us to a grouchy soliloquy about the unfairness of a recent weightlifting competition at the JSOTF. Because the object had been to bench-press a total amount of weight over a large number of repetitions, a certain amount of strategy was involved, and “this narrow-assed, toothpick, pocket-protector-wearing kind of motherfucker,” as he put it, “beat out a marine who had played linebacker at the University of Minnesota.”

“My daddy’s got a new wife,” another sergeant told us. “They keep getting younger and younger. This one won’t fly in planes. She hates cities. But my daddy’s happy. She goes fishing with him. She baits her own hook. That’s all he wants.”

One sergeant had been the veritable mayor of a small town in Kosovo in 1999. He had to inspect a house, he told us. “ ‘Fine,’ this Albanian woman said, ‘but please stay out of my baby’s room. He’s sleeping.’ There was an altercation. The woman became hysterical. I told her I had to inspect the room. ‘I’ll be quiet, ma’am, I’m not going to hurt your baby.’ I picked up the baby and felt under the mattress. There was an AK-47 with the safety off and a blue-tipped armor-piercing bullet in the chamber with a full magazine. When I got to the Balkans, I thought that the Serbs were the bad guys, but the Albanians never ceased to amaze me,” he concluded.

“Jimmy Carter,” yet another muttered, apropos of nothing, “what a fucking loser. He gives away the Panama Canal without even negotiating and now the PLA [People’s Liberation Army of China] is all over Panama with intel operations. Bet your life the Chinese will fight us asymmetrically.” [34] In fact, a Chinese shipping company held the contract for operating the ports at both ends of the Panama Canal.

I raised the subject of Basilan just across the strait, its mountainous outline now a slightly darker ink shade than the night sky. “I was there,” a medic at the table said. “We infiltrated villages, built roads, won over the moms and pops by treating their kids’ skin diseases, and got info on bad guys in return. It was good stuff.” “Only problem with Basilan is that we left,” someone else said. “We had to practically force the Fil government to take over the civilian aid projects that we started for the Muslim community. When you visit there in a few days, I’ll guarantee you that half the wells we built won’t work anymore.”

The women at the table were partly ignored. But their good looks and proximity had been something for the guys to look forward to. The Green Beret who had gone off with one of the girls in the direction of the beach suddenly reappeared. Driving back, someone joked about smelling his finger to see where it had been.

One of Maj. Lemire’s A-teams was allowed the run of the town, though. That was ODA-145, headed by the laconic master sergeant from Mississippi, in white slacks, penny loafers, and a loose summer shirt concealing his 9mm Beretta. ODA-145 was the force protection team for Zamboanga. Over the years and decades, following the bombing of the U.S. Marine barracks in 1983 in Lebanon, of the Khobar Towers complex in 1996 in Saudi Arabia, and other incidents, the U.S. military had become Israeli-like in its distrust of the local environment and its obsession with security. It was ODA-145’s job to get to know people: to get outside the perimeter, prowl around, find out the normal traffic patterns so that they could spot abnormal ones, develop contacts at the docks and whorehouses, make friends with the local drug-enforcement people for the extra eyes and ears they offered. “No freaking way we’re depending on the Filipino military,” the Mississippian counseled.